Some Republican Senators have been talking about trying to postpone the hearings until September, claiming that they need more time to review her complex record.

In reality, Sotomayor’s record isn’t all that complicated. It consists of two parts.

Her legal opinions are those of a grind: not brilliant, but not so lame that you couldn’t imagine her as one of the dimmer bulbs on the Supreme Court.

Of course, the problem with being on the Court of Appeals (like Sotomayor at present) is that if you indulge your political biases too much, you’ll get embarrassingly overruled by the Supreme Court (as Sotomayor got overturned on the Ricci v. DeStefano case).

Once you are on the Supreme Court, however, you are (effectively) above the law. So past opinions you’ve written are of less predictive value about how you will rule when unfettered than your off-hours volunteering.

Racial preferences have been very, very good to Sonia Sotomayor. And it would be only natural for her to be very, very good to preferences when she’s on the Supreme Court.

Obviously, Sotomayor is going to be approved. The Democrats have 60 Senators and she only needs 50.

And many Republican Senators would no doubt like to fold quietly, what with, as we are constantly told in the media, Hispanics accounting for nine percent of the vote according to exit polls in 2008. (Actually, the Hispanic share of the vote in 2008 turned out to be, according to the gold standard Census Bureau survey of 50,000 households, only 7.4 percent, but who cares about reality?)

The tactical issue for the Republicans, however, is whether they are going to forfeit all the political mileage they could get out of the Ricci victory—in which the Supreme Court brusquely junked Sotomayor’s decision upholding corrupt racial discrimination against white firemen in New Haven.

The Main Stream Media, of course, has every intention of shoving Ricci far down the Memory Hole. The only way to remind the public of what is at stake is to make Ricci the central focus of the Sotomayor hearings.

The strategic issues for Republicans are manifold:

Are they going to acquiesce in the growing assumption in the press that minorities, such as Obama and Sotomayor, are beyond criticism on anything related to race? If so, what does that bode for the future of the GOP?

The Obama Administration will no doubt have provided Judge Sotomayor with test-marketed talking points. Anyway, the public doesn’t much care about judicial philosophy in the abstract. It cares about philosophies when they lead to injustices done to actual people, such as what Sotomayor authorized be done to Ricci and his colleagues.

Second, you don’t have to ask Sotomayor the toughest questions about the Ricci case. The media is all prepared to raise a stink about evil white male Senators being unchivalrous and insensitive being toward a Latina. But, fortunately, there’s a sleazy white male stand-in for Sotomayor.

Make Ricci v. DeStefano humanly vivid to the public by calling as witnesses both parties: the victim-turned-winner, fireman Frank Ricci, and the victimizer-turned-loser, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr.

Then let the eight-term politician (who happened to be a Democrat) have it with both barrels for his slimy acts of racial discrimination against Ricci.

An argument among three Italian-American guys—Ricci, DeStefano, and Alito—is less easy for the media to spin along its usual ethnic/gender “Who? Whom?” lines. So, for once, people will be allowed to think simply about principles of justice.

It won’t be hard to show that, in practice, “diversity” is just another word for DeStefano’s Boss Tweed-type politics.

Here are my questions to ask the “wise Latina“—after you’ve worked out on DeStefano.

Obviously, she’ll bob and weave around most of them, refusing to answer on the usual specious grounds employed by past nominees. But these questions would be worth asking for their own rhetorical sake:

Much as Chief Justice John Roberts asked during oral arguments over Ricci… Can you assure us, Judge Sotomayor, that your decision in Ricci for the City of New Haven would have been the same if minority firefighters scored highest on this test in disproportionate numbers, and the City said we don’t like that result, we think there should be more whites on the fire department, and so we’re going to throw the test out?

On the South Wall of the Supreme Court Building’s courtroom are carvings of the “great lawgivers of history.” The second earliest lawgiver depicted is Hammurabi, king of Babylon, who is honored for carving the laws in stone and putting them up in public—which meant that even the king couldn’t change the laws after the fact to suit his convenience. Why should Mayor DeStefano enjoy the privilege that King Hammurabi denied himself: to see what the final score turned out to be, then change the rules of the game?

In the Obama Administration’s friend of the court brief to the Supreme Court on the Ricci case, the Obama Administration called for your decision for summary judgment in favor of Mayor DeStefano to be overturned and the Ricci case to be remanded to local district court for retrial on the facts. Why did you vote for a more extremist outcome than the Obama Administration later called for?

Chief Justice Robert s recently wrote, “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Do you agree?

Here’s a guest question from Emily Bazelon of Slate and the Yale Law School about your terse judgment in Ricci: “The problem for Sotomayor, instead, is why she didn’t grapple with the difficult constitutional issues, the ones Cabranes pointed to. Did she really have nothing to add to the district court opinion? In a case of this magnitude and intricacy, why would that be?”

Is the primary point of our civil rights laws to protect minorities or to protect individuals of all races?

You have described yourself on video as “a product of affirmative action” and an “affirmative action baby” and that it is “critical that we promote diversity.” Considering your often-expressed passionate views on the topic and personal self-interest in promoting ethnic preferences, how could Frank Ricci have expected even-handed, colorblind justice from you?

Yes, but, according to the Supreme Court, Frank Ricci didn’t get justice from you, now did he?

I realize you resent these questions, but aren’t doubts about racial bias inevitably created by the act of treating people of different races differently, acts which you endorse?

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Race Realism

‘Man is a mammal and subject to the same biological laws as other animals. All animals, including Man, have inheritable behavioural traits. The concept of complete environmental plasticity of human intelligence is a nonsensical wishful-thinking illusion.’

From titans to Lemmings

“The time for talk has ended, only course of action open to us is WAR!”

"The time for talk has ended, only course of action open to us is WAR!"

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D.H. Lawrence

Ayers’ Plan to Kill 25 Million Americans
Larry Grathwol, Weathermen, William Ayers, Communism, History
line

“The most effective informer the F.B.I. ever placed among the Weathermen” (NY Times) Larry Grathwol describes how William Ayers and other Weather Underground leaders cheerfully planned to deliver the United States to foreign occupation, and proposed to murder 25 million Americans.

Grathwohl: I brought up the subject of what’s going to happen after we take over the government. You know, we become responsible for administrating, you know, 250 million people. And there was no answer. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people?

The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States. They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education in the Southwest where we would take all of the people who needed to be re‑educated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be. I asked, “Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can’t re‑educate, that are die-hard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated and when I pursued this further, they estimated that they’d have to eliminate 25 million people in these re‑education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill 25 million people. I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious.

Bring it on! WE WILL FIGHT YOU, WE HAVE BEEN MAKING BOMBS AND BUYING LEGAL AND ILLEGAL WEAPONS FOR YEARS, AND WHEN THE TIME COMES MY FELLOW PATRIOTS AND MYSELF, WE WILL TAKE TO THE STREETS, YOU WILL HAVE TO KILL US TO TAKE THIS NATION, BRING IT!!